Last week, I published a meta-analysis of AI Overviews and their impact on SEO.
Today, I publish an analysis of the research on AI chatbots and their potential impact on customer acquisition and purchase decisions.
Image Credit: Lyna ™
I’ve analyzed 14 studies and research papers to answer five key questions:
How valuable is AI chatbot visibility?
How can you grow your AI chatbot visibility?
How are people searching on AI chatbots?
What challenges are associated with AI chatbots?
Where are AI chatbots headed?
This analysis is perfect for you if you:
Are unsure about whether to invest in AI chatbot visibility.
Want an overview of the state of AI chatbots.
Look for ways to optimize for AI chatbots.
I don’t include AI Overviews in this analysis since I’ve covered them in depth in last week’s Memo.
Sources:
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Get the spreadsheet.
How Valuable Is AI Chatbot Visibility?
While AI chatbot traffic currently represents a tiny percentage of overall traffic, the data shows early evidence for the value of citations and mentions.
AI chatbot adoption is skyrocketing, referral traffic to websites is growing, and traffic quality is high.
Adoption
ChatGPT has over 400 million weekly users as of January 2025.1
Semrush, 12/24: Most ChatGPT users are from the U.S. (25%) or India (12%), followed by India, Brazil, the UK and Germany. 70% are male, and over 50% are between 18 and 34 years old.
Higher Visibility, 02/25: 71.5% of consumers use ChatGPT for searching but complementary to Google, not as a replacement.
Ahrefs, 02/25: 63% of websites receive at least some traffic from AI sources. Only 0.17% of total visits came from AI Chatbots, with top sites achieving up to 6%.
98% of AI traffic comes from three AI chatbots: ChatGPT (> 50%), Perplexity (30.7%), and Gemini (17.6%).
Smaller sites get proportionally more visits from AI.
Semrush, 02/25: The generative AI market was valued at $67 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow annually by 24.4% through 2030.
Referral Traffic
Source
Semrush, 12/24: ChatGPT referrals to websites grew by 60% between June and October.
Semrush, 02/25: ChatGPT’s reach has expanded dramatically, sending traffic to over 30,000 unique domains daily in November 2024, up from less than 10,000 in July.
Online services, education, and mass media are getting the most referral traffic from ChatGPT after filtering out authentication URLs. Retail, finance, and healthcare show lower volumes.
Growth Memo, 02/25: The quality of AI chatbot traffic is superior in several key metrics:
The average session duration is 10.4 minutes for AI chatbot referrals versus 8.1 minutes for Google traffic.
Users view more pages: 12.4 pages on average for AI chatbot referrals compared to 11.8 for Google traffic.
Impact On Purchase Decisions:
Adobe, 10/24: 25% of Britons use AI while shopping online.
AI usage rose 10x between July and September to 10 billion visits to UK retail websites and ~100 million products.
Most shoppers are looking for deals:
In an Adobe survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers, 7 in 10 respondents who have used generative AI for shopping believe it enhances their experience. Additionally, 20% of respondents turn to generative AI to find the best deals, followed by quickly finding specific items online (19%) and getting brand recommendations (15%).
Semrush, 02/25: 46% of ChatGPT queries use the Search feature.
The research paper “A comparative study on the effect of ChatGPT recommendation and AI recommender systems on the formation of a consideration set” by Chang et al. looked at 471 consumers to understand:
Whether ChatGPT impacts consumer choices.
The process that impacts choices.
The impact on products with low-brand awareness vs. high-brand awareness.
Results:
ChatGPT does influence the consumer purchase journey and products recommended by ChatGPT are more likely to be adopted.
Products with low brand awareness see higher trust after a recommendation from ChatGPT.
My Take
ChatGPT had 560 million unique worldwide visitors in December 2024, compared to Google’s 6.5 billion. For comparison, that’s still small but about the size of X/Twitter today.
ChatGPT sending more referral traffic to a diverse list of domains is probably a strategic move to win the web over and establish itself more as an alternative to Google. I don’t think OpenAI has to do that. I think they strategically chose to.
So far, it seems young men in the U.S., BRIC, and Europe are the major users of ChatGPT. If that’s your target audience, optimizing for AI chatbot visibility should be a higher priority.
To be crystal clear, I don’t think anybody has to optimize for AI chatbot visibility. I’m confident that most industries will be fine doing classic SEO for years to come. Some will even be fine in a decade. However, you can’t unsee the rapid adoption, which leads us to a situation where two things are true: classic SEO still works, and there is a first-mover advantage on AI chatbots.
How Can You Grow Your AI Chatbot Visibility?
Improving AI chatbot visibility is a mix of known and new levers.
Crawlability
Being visible on AI chatbots starts with being visible to their crawlers. Crystal Carter, head of SEO Commus at Wix, calls this “retrievability.”
Groomed XML sitemaps, strong internal linking, fast server response, and clean HTML are a good start.
LLM crawlers are less forgiving than Google when it comes to JavaScript and client-side rendering for critical SEO components. Avoid at all cost!
Brand Strength
Ziff Davis, 11/24: A Ziff Davis study compares Domain Authority in curated (OpenWebText, OpenWebText2) with uncurated public web indices (Common Crawl, C4) to investigate how major AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta trained their large language models. The unsurprising conclusion is that AI developers prefer curated text to train their models, naturally giving commercial publishers more visibility.
Semrush, 12/24: Google tends to show larger domains, ChatGPT smaller ones. The opposite is true for transactional searches: Search GPT prefers larger domains, Google smaller ones.
Seer, 01/25: Backlinks showed no correlation with AI chatbot visibility.
Organic Ranks
Seer, 01/25: Brands ranking on page 1 of Google showed a strong correlation (~0.65) with LLM mentions. Bing rankings also mattered, but a little less (~0.5–0.6).
Semrush, 02/25: The overlap between Google, Perplexity, and ChatGPT search is low (25-35% on average). However, the overlap between ChatGPT search and Bing is much higher (average = 7 domains) than with Google (4 domains).
Go Off-Google
Source
Semrush, 02/25: YouTube is the third largest domain by referral traffic from ChatGPT. Facebook, LinkedIn, and GitHub are in the top 10.